In Berkeley, Fine Dining Starts
Early

Pilot Program Serves Gourmet
Breakfasts in Elementary School

MEREDITH MAY / SF Chronicle
7apr2005

Fourth-grader Jovanni Cardenas maneuvered a red Radio Flyer wagon, laden with
caramelized onion and fingerling potato focaccia, down the hall of LeConte
Elementary in Berkeley.

Mindfully.org
note:
We are strongly in favor of programs like this being
spread throughout the US. But the title of this article is more than a bit
misleading. A healthy diet and a gourmet diet are not necessarily the same
thing. We'd prefer that this healthy diet be considered as what should be
the norm for ALL children. Calling it a gourmet diet makes the reader feel
this is something extra... something that is too expensive and too troublesome
to be serving to any child in any school.

Not a New Idea
Forty years ago, the Black Panther Party made a healthy
diet part of their school lunch program at all of their facilities across
the US and in a few other countries. For this J. Edgar Hoover called the
Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of this
country."
(source of Hoover quote)

He has the vaunted title of "snack passer," helping deliver free,
healthful breakfasts to the desks of each of the school's 354 students. It is
the latest such effort in a school district that is a national leader in the
fight against childhood obesity and hunger.

Because the district is in Berkeley, the food that began rolling out at
LeConte this week has to measure up to some of the toughest school food
guidelines in the nation: no hydrogenated oils, no dyes or preservatives, no
refined sugars, no bovine growth hormones and absolutely no genetically altered
"Frankenfood."

"I've never seen this stuff before, and when I look at it, it looks
kinda nasty," Tommy Rodriguez, 10, said Wednesday morning as he stared at a
bosc pear and the square of focaccia. "But then I try it, and it's pretty
good."

Berkeley Unified School District modeled its program after red-wagon
breakfasts in Antioch and Folsom (Sacramento County). But those districts serve
traditional cafeteria fare, such as pizza pockets or French toast fingers, that
helps make 27 percent of the state's kids overweight, said Karen Candito,
Berkeley's director of nutrition.

It took Candito three years to find a handful of vendors willing to provide
the nine-grain muffins, organic cereal and other fare that lives up to the
groundbreaking food policy the district adopted last fall. The plan encourages
employees to model healthy snack behavior and sends parents guidelines on how to
pack nutritious lunches. It encourages eating locally grown food, with extra
credit for eating produce grown in school gardens.

"Lots of district food directors want to take this path, but they don't
have the support," Candito said. "At Berkeley, we have an integrated
focus on physical education, school gardens, nutrition education and a
commitment to healthy food in the cafeteria," Candito said.

LeConte is the first of Berkeley's 16 schools to try universal breakfast
delivery. If the program is successful this year, the goal is to have red- wagon
service in all schools except Berkeley High by 2007. Candito has applied for a
federal grant, which would provide $15,000 per school, to expand the program.
The district is using reimbursements from the federal free and reduced-price
lunch program to pay for the universal breakfast at LeConte, where half the
students already qualify for free meals.

"I love it because I don't have to skip breakfast anymore," said
Sarah Abiharb, 9. "Now, I eat with my class together like a nice little
feast."

Although breakfast is available at all Berkeley school cafeterias, many kids,
just like their parents, are too rushed to get to school early enough to eat it.
At LeConte, less than one-fourth of the students make it to the cafeteria before
8:15 a.m., district nutrition supervisor Marni Posey said.

"They are held up on the bus, their parents are late, they sleep
in," Posey said.

Teachers gave the new breakfast mixed reviews. Some of them have embraced it,
singing food songs with their children or making up nutrition quizzes while
breakfast is served, while others say it cuts into teaching time that is already
being whittled away by mandatory state test preparation.

The system has a few kinks. Some kids eat at home and decline the meal, the
kindergartners make a mess that takes a long time to clean up, and some of the
offerings, like onions in the morning, are a little too "Chez Panissey"
for kids, district spokesman Mark Coplan said.

But logistics are fixable, Candito said. The real problems, she said, are
hungry or overweight children who are distracted from learning by health
problems.

A study this week showed that California's obesity bill is $21.7 billion a
year thanks to the resulting medical care, workers' compensation and lost
workplace productivity, Candito said.

"It's taken so many years to get into this childhood obesity mess, it's
going to take years to unravel it," she said.

Researchers at Children's Hospital Oakland and UC Berkeley's Center for
Weight and Health are going to study the Berkeley red-wagon program's effect on
student health. If the results are positive, Candito said she hopes to use the
information to lobby lawmakers to put more money into overhauling school food.

Berkeley's efforts are drawing attention: A group of school administrators
from Olympia, Wash., flew in recently for a kitchen tour, and San Francisco
supervisors have asked their public school leaders to look to districts like
Berkeley's for . It teamed up this year with Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse
Foundation, which is giving the district $3.8 million over three years to fold
healthy eating into the curriculum.

LeConte student Lindsey Flores, 10, didn't quite look inspired Wednesday as
she sniffed at her breakfast focaccia, took a bite, and spit it out.

"It's gross," she said. "I like the pizza pie from the
cafeteria better."

Brandon Small, 10, solved the problem by scraping the potatoes and onions off
with his pencil.

"I used to skip breakfast because I would wake up late," he said.
"Now, I learn better because when I'm hungry all I think about is
food."